For most of the past 150 years, the world has known the poetry of Emily Dickinson almost entirely through the genre of the individual lyric poem. Even during her lifetime, the few instances when her work appeared in print (in every case, apparently, without her foreknowledge), it was through the medium of the single, stand-alone […]
Soon after Emily Dickinson died, in May, 1886, at the age of 55, her younger sister Lavinia found a locked box in the second-floor bedroom of the house they shared in Amherst, Massachusetts. Inside were more than 1,500 original manuscript poems, half of them neatly copied onto folded sheets of stationary and bound into small […]
Built in the late 1950s, Bartlett Hall at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is home to the school’s large and vibrant English Department, its award-winning Writing Program, renowned departments of Art History, Philosophy, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and numerous other programs, most of them associated with the University’s College of Humanities and Fine […]
Although the idea is hardly “sweeping the nation,” there are probably more efforts underway right now to form new, breakaway states, and even new republics, within the United States than at any other time since the Civil War. According to a recent article in The Daily Beast: Five counties in Maryland want to form their […]
For all of 2012 and most of 2013, I could look out the window of my office on the west side of Bartlett Hall, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and watch the new residential campus of our Commonwealth Honors College going up across Hicks Way. The pace of construction was astounding […]
In the fall of 1961, my family moved from Greenville, South Carolina, where I was born in June that year, to a little town in east Tennessee called LaFollette, where my father had his first medical practice. LaFollette was a poor, rural community; and my father, 30 years old and just a year out of […]
It was late August, 2006. I had just moved to western Massachusetts, and I needed to figure out how I was going to get to work every day from my home in Northampton to my office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, seven miles away. In the weeks leading up to the start of fall […]
Late August for academics is time to return to campus. And returning to campus is, invariably, an occasion for thinking both about what one accomplished (and didn’t accomplish) over the summer and about what one needs to accomplish (and would like to accomplish) in the coming year. For me, it’s a good time to assess […]
When I was growing up in North Carolina, it was sometimes said that slavery only really existed in the eastern part of the state; the western part was historically a land of small farms, tilled by their owners, a place more like Vermont, geographically and ideologically, than South Carolina. It was something of a shock, […]
The trip to northwest Rowan County, North Carolina, in the summer of 2007 was valuable in several respects. I learned my way around the Third Creek community. I took photographs, several of which turned out to be useful in later research. And I visited the graves of the three individuals I most wanted to learn […]
City of Rhetoric 